Finding Triton
by Cyn Finnegan
Summary: A child vanishes, leaving his birth parents to wonder. Twelve years later, when five boys suddenly appear in the Potter's living room, they notice one looks familiar. Could Trowa Barton really be Harry and Ginny's long-lost son? Chapters 1-4 updated.
1. How to Save a Life

**Finding Triton**

I don't own Gundam Wing, Harry Potter, or the characters from them. I'm just borrowing them. If I did, the Remastered version of the Gundam Wing series would have also been uncut and included the "Odds & Evens" episodes, and the HP movies would have been closer to the books.

Rated "M" for language.

**Summary:** One day, two-year-old Triton Bloom vanished when his foster parents' caravan was caught in the crossfire of an Alliance attack on a rebel group, leaving his birth parents to wonder his fate. Twelve years later, when five teenaged boys suddenly appear in Harry and Ginny Potter's living room, they notice one boy looks familiar. Could Trowa Barton really be Harry and Ginny's long-lost out-of-wedlock son?

**Warning:** This is **NOT** a slash or yaoi fic. While there are some feelings between Trowa and Quatre, this is a family/brotherly love story with some hurt/comfort thrown in. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it.

**Potterverse:** slightly AU between Books Six and Seven and the end of DH.

**GWverse:** partly AU from "The Gundam They Call ZERO" on.

**Gundam Wing © Sunrise. Harry Potter © J.K. Rowling. Used without permission and not for profit.**

**How to Save a Life**

**Near Dublin, Ireland, July 25th, AC 180**

"You ready?" the bespectacled young man with tousled black hair and sad emerald green eyes asked his companion, a young and obviously unhappy redheaded woman holding a tiny infant with cinnamon colored hair to her breast.

Harry James Potter watched as the baby, a boy, nursed almost greedily, his bow-shaped pink mouth latched firmly onto his mother's nipple, his tiny, long fingered hands curling and uncurling against the warm, comforting mound. It seemed to Harry that their three-day-old son, Triton Remus Potter, knew what was about to happen, and wanted to spend as much time with his mother, Ginevra Weasley, Ginny for short, as possible.

"No," Ginny replied glumly as little Triton stopped suckling and released her nipple, "but it can't be helped, can it? As long as he's with us, he's in danger."

Ginny closed her blouse, then shifted baby Triton from her breast to her shoulder so she could burp him. Singing softly, she rocked the baby, patting and rubbing his back until a soft "urp" escaped his lips, then laid Triton down on his blanket to change his diaper.

The baby's young parents took a moment to take yet another inventory of their son. They saw a perfect child with fine hair the light, reddish brown color of cinnamon, ten fingers, ten toes, and obviously male. They also saw the other reason for the baby's name; a trident-shaped strawberry birthmark on his right hip. After Ginny pinned on the diaper, Harry took a soft knit cap of baby blue and covered the top of Triton's head with it. Except for the shape of his cloudy blue eyes, Triton was his mother's child, and Ginny was sure that, when they changed color, his eyes would be the same emerald green as Harry's, instead of her own soft brown.

While Ginny had been frightened, Harry had actually been over the moon with joy when she told him of her pregnancy, which he'd called their "happy accident", until they both realized that Voldemort still wanted Harry dead and would most likely try to use Ginny and the baby as hostages, especially if he knew of the newborn boy's existence. That was, if the Dark Tosser didn't just kill them outright.

Therefore, with that in mind, a heavy-hearted Harry and Ginny contacted Ginny's oldest brother, Bill Weasley, who contacted the Blooms, who said they would love to adopt the baby, but Milo and Sharon insisted that the adoption be open. After all, they wanted Triton to know who his real parents were and where he came from, and The Blooms were glad for the opportunity to adopt the son they desperately wanted.

Milo and Sharon Bloom were circus performers and old Muggle friends of Bill's from his days at Hogwarts. They'd already had one child, a pretty, curly red-haired two-year-old daughter named Catherine, but they wanted to have a large family, and Cathy's birth had been difficult for Sharon. The couple knew they couldn't risk having another child, so it seemed like a godsend when Bill asked them to take in his baby sister's baby, at least until Voldemort could be put down once and for all.

Her heart breaking, Ginny wrapped the swaddling on their son, and then brushed aside the tuft of soft, cinnamon colored baby fuzz that peeked out of his cap from his forehead and kissed his soft cheek. As she carried him to his new family, she sang a tune that she knew Harry liked, but she couldn't remember for all of her the name of it or the group who sang it.

A few moments later, Ginny handed the infant to her ex-boyfriend, who first kissed his firstborn son on his forehead, then handed him to his uncle who, in turn, handed the baby to his new family. The Blooms cooed over their new baby boy as Sharon took Triton into her arms and little Cathy already adored her new baby brother at first sight. Harry handed Milo a Manila envelope with Triton's birth records, signed by one Poppy Pomfrey, inside. Milo then got Sharon, Triton, and Cathy loaded into their caravan wagon and drove off, headed towards the city.

"We'll get him back, Gin," Harry had finally said, wrapping her in his arms and trying to give the weeping girl some bit of comfort. Harry felt the loss of their baby son as keenly as Ginny did, but with their lives in constant danger, what could they do but give him up for now? "When all this is over, when the Dark Tosser's gone and there are no more Death Eaters on our tails, we'll get our Triton back. I promise."

**Author's Notes:** The idea for this was simple: I'd seen plenty of Harry Potter/Gundam Wing fics which had Harry being either Trowa's younger brother, cousin, nephew or son, and I wondered "What if Trowa were the child, and Harry and Ginny were his parents? What if he were born while they were still attending Hogwarts? And what if they gave him up to be adopted by Cathy's parents?" This is the result.

The songs Ginny sings to Trowa/Triton (and that he remembers) are _Ride!_, by Pretty & Twisted, featuring vocals by Johnette Napolitano, lead singer for Concrete Blonde, and Louis Armstrong's _What A Wonderful World_. I chose them because they sound like lullabies.


	2. The Lost Son

Again, I don't own Gundam Wing, Harry Potter, or the characters from them. I'm just borrowing them. If I did, the Remastered version of the Gundam Wing series would have also been uncut and included the "Odds & Evens" episodes, and the HP movies would have been closer to the books.

Rated "M" for language.

**Summary:** How Triton Bloom became Nanashi.

**Warning:** Again, this is **NOT** a slash or yaoi fic. While there are some feelings between Trowa and Quatre, this is a family/brotherly love story with some hurt/comfort thrown in. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it.

**Potterverse:** slightly AU between Books Six and Seven and the end of DH.

**GWverse:** partly AU from "The Gundam They Call ZERO" on.

**Gundam Wing © Sunrise. Harry Potter © J.K. Rowling. Used without permission and not for profit.**

**Somewhere in the Black Forest, Germany, August 4th, AC 182**

A pitched battle between the Order of the Zodiac's Special Mobile Suit Corps, or Specials for short, and a band of local freedom fighters was getting closer to the forest road traveled by a small, single-ring circus troupe run by a man named Blackthorn. A shell from one of the Alliance's Leos hit a tree, sending flaming shards of wooden shrapnel everywhere, including the back of the wagon. One of these shards struck little Triton Bloom's back, burning him, while his big sister Cathy screamed at the top of her lungs.

"Milo, help me get the kids out! Those blasts are getting closer!" Sharon exclaimed, grabbing Cathy while Milo picked up Triton. Carrying them to the front of the wagon, the couple tossed the children out just as an OZ mortar shell struck the wagon, killing Milo and Sharon instantly, but blowing both Cathy and Triton clear of the blast area.

Cathy landed on her bottom and started wailing, but as Triton landed, a stone struck him hard on the back of his head, setting off another explosion of pain and terror within him. Pushed past his limits, the toddler wished to be anywhere but where he was and, with a loud CRACK like an M80 exploding, he disappeared.

Sometime later, a lost little boy with cinnamon colored hair awoke. His emerald green eyes were dull and sore from crying, but when had he been crying? He couldn't remember how he got there or how long he'd been lying there, but he was sick to his stomach and the pain in his head and back was almost unbearable. The clothes he wore were dirty and smelled as if scorched.

As a wave of dizziness struck him, the boy reached to feel where the pain in the back of his head was. He touched it, winced, pulled his hand away, and looked at his fingers. He found them covered with sticky, drying blood, and that frightened him.

In spite of the pain and fear he felt, he managed to get up on his feet and started walking towards the setting moon, and as he walked, he looked at the moon and stars, and thought that living in space had to be a lot better than living on Earth. He kept walking until he found several large, flatbed trucks, each with a mobile suit, covered with a tarp, tied down in the back. They turned out to be the band of freedom fighters that had been battling OZ and the Alliance earlier.

A man in one of the trucks saw the boy, jumped out of the cab, and knelt down until he was near the child's eye level. He sported a beard called a Van Dyke, and his right eye covered with a bandage.

"Hey, kid. Ya got a name?" the leader of the mercenaries asked the boy gently. The confused child shook his head in response. "No, huh? Well, come here. The least we can do is give you something to eat, poor chibi."

Noticing the youngster was shivering, the mercenary captain took a spare blanket and wrapped it around the little one, then sat the toddler on his lap, handed him two ration bars, and had one of his men heat up a cup of dried whole milk he reconstituted with some bottled water. When the liquid was hot but not scalding, the captain doled out a large dollop of honey from a jar and stirred it into the milk, then gave it to the boy and encouraged him to drink it.

When the boy finished his meager meal, he fell into a deep, exhausted sleep. The man, the captain of the mercenaries, stood up and carried the boy to his tent, where he laid the boy down on a spare cot and stripped the filthy, scorched clothes off the toddler's body. He grabbed a basin, a jug of water, a bar of soap, a rag and a medikit, and then proceeded to clean the boy up. He found a badly blistered burn on the boy's back, washed it gently, slathered it with burn gel, and then dressed it with gauze pads and tape. The man knew it would likely turn into a scar, but probably not a bad one.

The boy was exhausted; he had not stirred once during all of this. The captain then grabbed a bottle of liniment from the medikit and massaged some into the toddler's legs so they would not be quite as sore in the morning.

When the captain finished, he rummaged through his duffel bag until he found a t-shirt and put it on the boy. Then he wrapped the boy back up in the blanket and left, letting him sleep. Being a father himself, he needed to inform his people that no one was to lay a finger on the kid, or there would be Hell to pay, and he would be the one collecting the charge.

"All right, you maggots, listen up," the captain bellowed at his troops. "The kid is _off limits_, ya hear me? Anything happens to little Nanashi, and I mean _anything at all_, I will _personally_ slit the guilty party's fucking throat for 'em, rip their guts out through their neck and use 'em for garters. Am I _clear_ on that?"

Most of the corps, men and women alike, agreed; like their captain, they were parents themselves. Many others weren't, but couldn't even think of harming a child. These men and women were human beings, not cold-blooded killers like the Alliance's mobile suit troops or OZ's so-called "Specials" were.

Meanwhile, at Number 12 Grimmauld Place in London, a young, newlywed couple, Harry and Ginny Potter, were watching a BBC2 news report about a circus troupe being caught in the crossfire of a bloody, brutal attack by OZ and Alliance forces on a band of mercenaries, or rather freedom fighters, in Germany.

The reporter, a young woman named Susan Bones, was on the air, verbally ripping the United Earth Sphere Alliance and OZ a new orifice for their lack of concern for the lives of civilians, focusing on the deaths of Milo and Sharon Bloom. She informed the viewing audience that the Blooms' four-year-old daughter, Cathy, was listed as physically unharmed but suffering from shock, and their two-year-old son, Triton, was missing and presumed dead.

Ginny burst into tears. She and Harry had gotten to a place where they could reclaim their son and raise him, and OZ destroyed that dream with a single shell blast. Harry knew that Ginny was inconsolable right now, so he went out to the back yard and looked up at the sky, feeling miserable himself.

After staring at the star-dappled sky for a while, Harry finally said, "If you're out there, Triton Remus Potter, _this_ is your home, and it should have been all along. _I_ made a mistake, and _you're_ the one who paid for it. If you _are_ alive out there, you and anyone who's with you, Magical or Muggle, will always find a home here. The wards will let you in."

Due to the severity of his head injury, the boy people called Nanashi wouldn't remember anything of his foster parents or his adopted sister. However, in the back of his young mind, he would hear a woman's voice singing about Mexico, saguaro cacti, and riding off into the sun and sky, and another about trees, roses, and the bright blessed day, and the dark sacred night.

He would hum these songs to himself when he needed comfort, which was often, or when doing something mindless like working on a mobile suit called Gundam Heavyarms after he migrated to the L3 colony cluster, or play them on the flute when he thought no one was paying attention to him.

**Author's Notes:** Again, I apologize for the shortness of the chapter. The third WILL be longer still, I promise, but will also skip ahead twelve years to when Trowa had infiltrated OZ. In the next chapter, Duo will be 15, while Hiiro, Trowa, Quatre and Wu Fei will all still be 14.

I figured that the mercenary captain would be one of the **only** people in the group actually looking out for Nanashi's wellbeing, or who even cared about him in the first place (making sure he ate, got plenty of sleep, telling his men what would happen to them if they tried anything funny with the kid, etc.). I also figured that not all of them would listen to their chief.

I couldn't remember if Susan Bones survived the final battle with Voldemort or not (I never got to finish reading DH), but given the accident she'd had while Apparating, I thought her working as a reporter for a Muggle news agency would suit her.


	3. The Sorrowful Battlefield

Again, I don't own Gundam Wing, Harry Potter, or the characters from them. I'm just borrowing them. If I did, the Remastered version of the Gundam Wing series would have also been uncut and included the "Odds & Evens" episodes, and the HP movies would have been closer to the books.

**This story is rated "M" for angst, language, and torture.**

**Chapter Summary:** Hiiro and Trowa try to save Quatre from the ZERO System, but does he _want_ to be saved?

**Warning:** Again, this is **NOT** a slash or yaoi fic. While there are some feelings between Trowa and Quatre, this is a family/brotherly love story with some hurt/comfort thrown in. If you don't like it, you don't have to read it.

**Potterverse:** slightly AU between Books Six and Seven and the end of DH.

**GWverse:** partially AU from "The Gundam They Call ZERO" on, starting with this chapter.

**Note:** This chapter is told almost completely from Trowa's perspective.

**Gundam Wing © Sunrise. Harry Potter © J.K. Rowling. Used without permission and not for profit.**

_Italics_ - Thoughts, emphasis.

_**CAPS IN BOLD ITALICS**_ - Shouting/screaming.

_:Italics between colons:_ - Telepathic conversation.

_"Italics in quotation marks"_ - written messages; TV and radio transmissions, telephone conversations.

**Chapter Three: The Sorrowful Battlefield**

**OZ's Lunar Base, June 12th, AC 195**

The fourteen-year-old Gundam pilot who called himself Trowa Barton was having a lousy month.

It all began with his current mission. He had to lie about his age by nearly a year, and hack into the L3 colony's computer servers in order to falsify his pitifully thin records and just barely managed to hide his gift from almost everyone during the recruitment process. He then used those records to infiltrate the Order of the Zodiac, or OZ. His mission was to get close to and assassinate the secret order's leader, General Treize Khushrenada, and his direct subordinate, Colonel Lady Midii Une.

However, after his brief interview with the "evil succubus," as Duo called her, the stoic young man put his orders to terminate her on the back burner. The momentary contact his mind made with Lady Une's told him that hers was fractured in two between the vicious Colonel who had threatened to destroy the colonies just two months before, and the gentle, peace-loving woman seated before him.

He also found out that Duo was right to call her a succubus. Wu Fei had told him that she possessed a "Newtype" ability similar to both Quatre and Trowa's own. But where Trowa could read the minds of others like a book and communicate with the other pilots through his thoughts, and Quatre could feel the emotions of those around him, she could actually manipulate how people thought and felt, getting them to see things _her_ way, and therefore Treize's way. That was how the Colonies allowed OZ to bring weapons into outer space.

Things started going sideways for Trowa when he overheard two OZ soldiers laughing about the death of Zayeed Winner, the father of one of his fellow Gundam pilots. The elder Winner had opposed OZ's plans to arm the L4 cluster, and in retaliation, he'd found himself blackballed and stripped of his position as a member of the Colony's ruling council, then falsely accused of hoarding resources when, in fact, he'd given them to anyone who asked.

The fact they were blaming the elder Winner not only for his own execution, but also for the injury of his eldest daughter, Dr. Irea Winner, and the disappearance of his only son worried Trowa. Quatre Raberba Winner, Pilot 04, wasn't just Trowa's friend and comrade, but he loved the pale-skinned, blond-haired boy like a little brother, even though they were most likely only a few months apart in age.

Soon after, the rest of his comrades, Hiiro Yui, Zhang Wu Fei, and Duo Maxwell, each wound up captured by the new rulers of the Earth Sphere. Trowa was responsible for Hiiro's capture, and he felt like a rat for it, but he was good at playing the rat, and figured Hiiro would forgive him for it later.

Wu Fei surrendered himself and his badly damaged Gundam, Shenlong, which he affectionately called Nataku, to Chief Engineer Nikolai Tsuberov and a squad of OZ Mobile Suit troops and Mobile Dolls. The only reason they captured him instead of killing him was because he was out of ammunition, nearly out of fuel, and he didn't even try to fight back. Scuttlebutt had it that Wu Fei grinned evilly at the troops who took him into custody.

Finally, the five Gundam designers captured and Master O badly beat Duo Maxwell after he infiltrated the moon base to assassinate them, not long after Trowa destroyed Duo's Gundam, the Deathscythe, with a beam cannon on live television. It was then the braided-haired pilot found out that they used the massive shipment of Gundanium alloy OZ ordered to rebuild and upgrade both his "old buddy," the Deathscythe, and Wu Fei's beloved Nataku, the Shenlong. They would be completely repaired, upgraded, and ready to go in exactly one month.

A few days later, the moon base had received a transmission. It said that the Order of the Zodiac's newly-acquired resource satellite at 07U1, which they stole from the Winner Mining Company with the blessings of the L4 Colony's governing body, had been completely obliterated by a new type of Gundam, and that its pilot warned them that he was going to destroy Colony 06E, also in the L4 cluster, next. He had, but OZ evacuated the colony, so the only ones who lost their lives on both of those occasions were all their own troops.

Trowa figured better them than Quatre, and that the troops got _exactly_ what they deserved.

Until that day, all three boys languished in the brig, not far from the mad scientists who built the five Gundams. He told the Mad Five about the new Gundam, and that the pilot had sent Sandrock's blueprints as a message. While Doctor J, Professor G, Doktor S and Master O wanted to know what the new Gundams specs were and what sort of firepower it had, Instructor H asked about the pilot. The note of concern in the old man's voice told Trowa that he was worried about Quatre and not the Gundam.

As he walked away from their cell, he overheard the one Duo called Professor G refer to Quatre as being either extremely stupid or incredibly violent for finishing that Gundam and installing some new type of operating system on it. He started to turn around so he could tell the old man off, to let him know that Quatre was neither violent nor stupid, but a young boy grieving for his father. A man who, in life, never paid his son more than a minute's worth of attention until after he ran away from home. The man who disowned his son as punishment for becoming a soldier and Gundam pilot, but not before the young Arabian pilot disinherited himself first.

Knowing Quatre as well as he did, Trowa knew he was most likely blaming himself for his father's execution, though it wasn't his fault.

He would have done just that, if Tsuberov hadn't picked that moment to order him to take an armed escort down to the brig and collect Pilot 01, then for the both of them to suit up and report to the shuttle transport hangar for immediate takeoff. Lady Une wanted information on what sort of damage that new Gundam was capable of inflicting, and it seemed to Trowa that she didn't give a damn if he and Hiiro died trying to find out.

_Could the succubus be on to me, then?_

The unsettling thought had popped up again, and again there was no easy answer. If she were aware of his true agenda, he would surely be languishing in the brig with his fellow pilots or in front of a firing squad by now, wouldn't he?

"Get out, Zero One!" an armed guard shouted to Hiiro as the cell door opened with a whoosh. The three young Gundam pilots all looked up to see two men armed with machine guns flanking a third, whom they recognized as their former comrade turned OZ lackey, Trowa Barton.

"C'mon, why _him_ again?" Duo grumbled. "I'm a better pilot than Zero One is, y'know. Let _me_ take care of the next battle."

"You can't do it in your condition," Trowa said as he entered the cell holding his former comrades. "Even a Gundam pilot runs the risk of being killed on this mission, because this time we'll be fighting against another Gundam pilot."

"_**What?!**_" was Wu Fei's shocked response.

"Apparently, this Gundam's a new model," Trowa continued, "and that one suit just wiped out an entire division of OZ soldiers."

"What are its weapons and characteristics?" Hiiro asked, standing up.

"The engineers asked me the same questions. That shows that you're familiar with them. We don't know yet. That's what we're supposed to go and find out."

"Okay, then, let's go," Hiiro said, his mind made up. "With that red one, the Mercurius, this should prove to be quite a fight."

"You're coming, whether you like it or not," Trowa said crossly, the British accent he tried to suppress slipping out.

"And you're just gonna sit back and watch as the two Gundam pilots kill each other, aren't you! Hey, Zero One,_ don't do it!_ It's probably another one of their lousy suit performance tests ... _**unngh!**_" Duo exclaimed, standing up, only to find himself doubled over Trowa's fist as it hit him in the solar plexus.

Thanks to Quatre, the chestnut-haired American pilot knew _exactly_ how hard Trowa could hit ... and this blow wasn't even close to it ... but something told him to make it look good for the guards. It took a moment for Duo to realize that it was _Trowa_ who "told" him that.

"Quiet, you two. You'll both _get your turn_ soon enough," Trowa said, using the opportunity to tuck something into Duo's cassock. Moments later, he, Hiiro, and the armed guards left while Duo straightened himself up with a groaned "oww".

"I don't think that guy was acting," Wu Fei said, angered that a fellow Gundam pilot had apparently turned his coat. "We have to assume that he really has betrayed us."

"We don't need to worry about _that_," Duo replied with a cocky grin as he retrieved Trowa's little present from inside his shirt. "He's one guy _I know_ we can trust."

"How can you be so sure of that?"

"Because no traitor's gonna give us a gift that so much thought's been put into. See for yourself."

What Trowa had slipped the braided-haired pilot turned out to be a microprojector loaded with detailed blueprints and schematics for the upgrades to Deathscythe, now called Deathscythe Hell, and Shenlong, now called Altlong. Duo aimed it at the wall of their cell, and Trowa's voice came on.

"Hey, that's ...!"

"Duo and Wu Fei," Trowa's disembodied voice said, "these blueprints were given to me by Master O. Use 'em to kill time. We'll be back to break you out of there soon."

"Son of a bitch," Wu Fei breathed, a faint smile creasing his astonished face.

"Right?" Duo asked in response, his own grin growing a little broader. "And G told me that they'll be ready in a month. Now that Quatre's back, we're gonna be _busy_ again."

The faint smile dropped from the Chinese pilot's face as he answered. "I'm not gonna count on an unknown Gundam as an ally."

"Huh? But Quat's _one of us_ ... that automatically _makes_ him an ally!"

"Maybe, but I've got a bad feeling about this. I'll be damned surprised if someone _doesn't_ die out there today."

Sometime later, Hiiro and Trowa were in space, piloting OZ's newest Mobile Suits, the Mercurius and the Vayeate. They were searching for Quatre and the new Gundam to find out what its capabilities were. They'd been too late to save the 06E colony, but fortunately Quatre had given them enough warning to evacuate the civilians, and the latest intel said that he was targeting a colony in their current location, but no news on which one yet.

"Once we meet up with Quatre," Trowa said to Hiiro through a private channel, one used only by the Gundam pilots and the Mad Five, "we can go ahead and stage an attack on the moon base. After I hack into the system and open the cells, Duo and Wu Fei can use the confusion to board their Gundams and escape, then we can fake our deaths by blowing these suits up and head back to Earth with Quatre. From there, we'll retrieve Wing and Heavyarms. The three of us in one Gundam will be a tight fit, but I think we can manage."

Hiiro chuckled at that image. "It's a good plan, but it might be more advantageous for you to stay _inside_ the Organization until you can get close to Treize. Then you can take him out," Hiiro finally said.

"So you _knew_ I was undercover all along, huh?" Trowa quipped with a faint chuckle.

"Yeah. Didn't help that you had the same look on your face when you "captured" me as you did when I handed Sylvia Noventa my gun."

"And _that_ was ...?"

"That "disapproving older brother" look you get. It takes a lot of self-control for me not to laugh at it." Both Hiiro and Trowa chuckled over that mental image for a moment, then Hiiro sobered and added, "Trowa, we should be careful. Something's _not right_ about this."

"Hiiro," the tall, cinnamon-haired teen responded with a heavy sigh, "this is _Quatre_ we're talking about. He's the kindest, _gentlest_ person on Earth or the Colonies. There's no need to worry."

"Maybe, but don't forget ... _he just destroyed a colony._ The civilians may have been evacuated to safety, but he _still_ destroyed it."

As he switched to a public channel, Trowa sighed again. He then ordered Hiiro to split off from the rest and search on his own. When one of the Space Leo pilots objected, Trowa reminded him that he still had the detonation switch to the Mercurius in his possession, and that Hiiro clearly saw the new Gundam as an enemy.

Within an hour of Hiiro's departure, they arrived at the colony and "Officer Barton" received a report that a three Leo scouting party ran into the new Gundam within the colony, and were completely wiped out when they confronted him. As Trowa started his back door hack into OZ's system, he ran a side search on the condition of Dr. Irea Winner, Quatre's eldest sister, and the results were good. She'd suffered from a minor concussion and some bruised ribs from their shuttle accident, but nothing more serious than that. She was currently searching for her little brother, so Trowa sent her an e-mail telling her that he'd located Quatre.

Minutes later, a small craft that looked very much like a pre-Colony fighter jet approached the search party at a high rate of speed. Though it looked a lot like Wing Gundam, Trowa knew it had to be the new one. This new Mobile Suit was very much like Wing in color scheme and appearance, especially in Bird Mode. After all, he'd piloted Wing Gundam during Hiiro's dual with Zechs Merquise in the Antarctic, so he was familiar with its lines.

"Okay, Quatre," Trowa breathed expectantly, "go ahead and show me what this new Gundam can do, and don't hold back."

Trowa watched as the new Gundam dodged beam cannon fire and machine gun shells with ease, including his own. A child could have easily dodged the blast from Trowa's beam cannon, and he only shot at the new Gundam to keep his escort from becoming suspicious. The doubled barreled rifle split into two separate ones, and in a circular sweep, the strange Gundam wiped out every single Space Leo ... and almost shot Trowa, who managed to dodge.

"Hiiro, there's no reason to worry. This new Gundam's _unparalleled_," the cinnamon-haired, green-eyed teen stated with a touch of awe in his voice. "Quatre, this is Trowa. Can you _hear_ me, Quatre?"

"Yeah, I can hear you loud and clear, Trowa," a raspy, tremulous voice came over the Vayeate's comm link. The warm, kind tone of the boy Trowa considered his best friend vanished, replaced by something he barely recognized as Quatre's voice. "Trowa ... _please_ ... don't come any closer."

Out of concern, Trowa tried using his gift to "talk" to Quatre, but something was blocking his attempts. _Wait a minute ... something's _not right_ here ... I can't _sense_ him at all. Could that Gundam be _blocking_ me?_

Ignoring the blond-haired boy's plea to stay away, Trowa steered the Vayeate closer to the new Gundam. Suddenly, the Gundam raised its Buster Rifle and locked it onto Trowa and the Vayeate.

"_**WHAT THE HELL DID I JUST SAY, TROWA?! I SAID DON'T COME ANY CLOSER TO ME!**_"

Trowa barely had enough time to say "Huh?" before the Vayeate was struck by a blast from the Gundam's double-barreled Buster Rifle. He cried out in pain as a chunk of the interior fuselage sloughed off and struck his helmet nearly hard enough to crack it, making a concussion a real possibility. He watched in shock and terror as nearly a third of the Vayeate disintegrated before his astonished eyes.

_Damn it ... my head's _splitting_, and it's _not_ just from that blast,_ the emerald-eyed teen thought as he felt something warm trickling down his face. It was blood from a gash on his forehead.

"Quatre, what's _going on_ here? Why did you attack me?" he asked, panting. For the first time in a long time, Trowa was terrified, and not only for himself. Something was wrong with Quatre, horribly wrong, and Trowa knew that the Gundam the young, blond Arabian piloted was behind it.

"Outer space has gone _crazy_, Trowa ... so I'm gonna use this Gundam to destroy it all," Quatre's now-raspy voice sobbed in his ears. "_I have no choice_ but to destroy all of the weapons that have accumulated out here. OZ has the Colonies arming themselves, right? That's why I _have_ to destroy them!"

Quatre's confused diatribe hadn't told Trowa anything. Again, the acrobatic teen asked "Quatre ... what the Hell's _really_ going on? C'mon, talk to me, please! This isn't _like_ you at all ...!"

"Trowa ... tell the others for me ... tell 'em to _stay away_ from me ... or else ... _I'll end up killing them_."

A proximity alarm went off inside the new Gundam, alerting him to the timely arrival of Hiiro and the Mercurius.

"_**I'M TELLING YOU NOT TO GET ANY CLOSER!**_" Quatre screamed, drawing a bead on Hiiro with the twin barreled Buster Rifle, but Hiiro managed to shoot the weapon out of the Gundam's hand. A moment later, Hiiro ignited the Mercurius' beam saber while Quatre's Gundam drew its own from its shoulder mount and lit it up.

"_**IS THAT ALL YOU'VE GOTTA SAY?!**_" the Prussian blue-eyed pilot screamed back. "If everything _has_ gone crazy, then I'll have faith in myself and keep on fighting! I don't_ want _to, but you're giving me_ no choice_ here!_ I'm gonna KILL you, Quatre!_"

For Trowa, the scene playing out before his eyes was like something out of a waking nightmare. His two best friends were about to kill each other, but with only a heavily damaged and nearly inoperable Mobile Suit to pilot, he was helpless to stop them from doing so. For some reason, the blond-haired Arabian boy's mind and soul were both in torment, as if something were forcing Quatre to do these things against his will, and his efforts to fight against it were hurting his mind even more.

With Hiiro distracting the younger pilot, Trowa tried "calling" him again.

_:Quatre, can you hear me?:_ he asked.

_:Trowa … :_ Quatre replied,_ :... It's _really_ you, isn't it? I ... I'm _not_ hallucinating?:_

_:Yeah, Quatre, it's really me. I have an idea to get you out of there, but I'm gonna need Hiiro's help. Just ... _please_ ... keep fighting whatever's hurting you for a bit longer, okay?:_

_:I'll try, but it _won't _let me stop, and fighting it _hurts .._.:_

_:I know, but be strong and hold on, Quatre. I'll get you out of this.:_

"Hiiro, keep him busy! I'm gonna try something!" Trowa said urgently. With his best friend's pain-filled mental screams echoing in his mind, the battered Heavyarms pilot managed to disconnect his seat harness and extricate himself from the damaged cockpit of the Vayeate.

"Trowa, what the Hell are you doing, trying to get yourself killed?" the Wing Gundam pilot yelled at his friend in surprise. "Quatre's lost his mind! He needs to be taken out, now!"

"Listen to me, Hiiro ... something's _terribly wrong_ with that Gundam. Keep it occupied until I can get over there and open up the cockpit's access hatch," Trowa shouted back.

"What do you mean by "keep it occupied"? Is it _that much_ like our Gundams?"

"Yeah, but there's something _twisted_ about it ... it's almost _evil_. I don't know how, but instead of it treating Quatre like its partner, it's _forcing _him to do all of this, and it _hurts _him if he tries to fight back or stop himself. I can hear him inside of it, screaming for help ... _I can't just leave him in there!_"

The only thing he hadn't mentioned was that the screams he heard weren't coming from Quatre's _mouth_, but from his _mind_. Hiiro already knew that, just as the half-Japanese pilot knew all along that his British counterpart _hadn't_ turned traitor on them. He saw it in his soul.

"Okay, pal," Hiiro finally answered with a heavy sigh as he closed his eyes briefly, then reopened them. "I'll give you five minutes to affect a rescue while I keep him from blasting your ass off. If you can't subdue him in that amount of time, I'll ditch this hunk of junk and take care of it myself."

"Five minutes. Roger that."

Performing the same maneuver Zechs had when he first arrived on Earth, Hiiro managed to immobilize the Wing Gundam look alike. While this was going on, Trowa located the pack that got him from the shuttle to the mobile suit transport and strapped himself back into it, then climbed out of what was left of the Vayeate. Using the compressed air of the pack to cover the meters between the OZ suit and the Gundam, Trowa found a handhold and started working on his rescue of Quatre.

"Come on, God damn you, let him _go_," Trowa muttered, slamming the side of his fist against the exterior access button. "You've been _raping his mind_ for days, now ... haven't you done _enough_ to him already?"

When he finally managed to open the cockpit of the new Gundam, Trowa gasped in shock and dismay at the sight that greeted him.

"Bloody Hell, Quatre ... what's _happened_ to you?"

Quatre looked like Satan had dragged him face first through Hell ... literally.

In his new flight suit, Quatre's formerly slim and wiry body looked nearly emaciated, as if he hadn't eaten more than a mouthful of food in days. His once-vibrant turquoise blue eyes were dulled by grief, pain and madness, and the pale flesh around them was ringed by a hideous shade of grayish purple, like the younger boy hadn't slept in a week, or had gotten his nose broken in a fistfight. Overall, he reminded Trowa of a trapped wild animal, looking for a way to escape and finding none.

"_**GET AWAY FROM ME, TROWA! I DON'T WANNA KILL YOU!**_" the blond-haired boy screamed at his one-time friend, tears streaming from his eyes as the British pilot suddenly found himself staring down the barrel of Quatre's pistol. In response, Trowa grabbed Quatre's right wrist and smashed it against the arm of the command chair, forcing him to drop the firearm with a cry of pain.

"Dammit, Quatre,_ snap out of it and stop it already!_" the taller teen growled, pressing his right thumb and middle finger to either side of the blond-haired boy's neck. With the blood flow to his brain temporarily interrupted, Quatre finally lost consciousness. Trowa then freed his friend from the Gundam's command chair, slung him over his shoulder, and carried him to where Hiiro, who had watched the entire scene and the Mercurius were waiting.

An hour later, on the colony they'd saved, Trowa sat by an artificial spring with the still unconscious Quatre cradled in his arms like a child while Hiiro stood watch. As a light breeze tugged at their hair and clothes, Trowa cupped his hand and dipped it into the spring, then brought it to his lips to taste it and find out how bad the chemical treatment of the water was.

As the cool liquid washed over his tongue, he got a pleasant surprise. The clean, sweet tasting water had a slight coppery aftertaste to it. It was mineral water. This, he realized, was one of the wealthier colonies, equipped with the very best and newest in climate control devices, like variable speed wind generators, and fresh spring water probably imported from the Earth itself.

Trowa dipped his hand into the spring again, this time for Quatre. The blond-haired Arabian boy swallowed reflexively as the water passed his chapped lips, and it seemed to revive him. Opening his eyes, Quatre tried to murmur an apology as Trowa helped him to sit up, but the British pilot shushed him and told him it wasn't necessary because he'd done nothing wrong.

"Hiiro, you _might_ want to get a drink of this water, yourself. It may be the _last_ one we get for quite a while," Trowa said as he looked up and felt his brow crease. Trowa and Hiiro went on high alert when they heard the sound of a gun cocking. A few moments later, the trio of young mobile suit pilots saw a squad of heavily armed OZ troops approaching them, guns aimed at the boys' heads.

Vastly outnumbered, two of the three young pilots put their hands on top of their heads, and all of them surrendered without a fight.

**Author's Notes:** Whew! Well, I promised a longer chapter and I think I delivered the goods without rambling too much. On a personal note, I would like to thank everyone who have so far read, reviewed, subscribed to or added this story to his or her favorites. I'm very glad you like it.

And before anyone gets pissed off with me about it, all five Gundam pilots had shown instances of having both physical and psychic Newtype abilities throughout the Gundam Wing anime. I just made these abilities a bit stronger, is all. I'll delve into them further as the story progresses.

Plus, the boys do treat their Gundams as if they're living beings in the anime, including talking to them like they're friends and even giving them nicknames.

**Next chapter:** OZ captures Hiiro, Trowa and Quatre, and Tsuberov has a trick up his sleeve ... literally.


	4. White Reflection

**Disclaimers, Ratings, Archive, Etc.:** See Chapter One.

**Chapter Summary: **OZ captures Hiiro, Trowa and Quatre, and Tsuberov has a trick up his sleeve ... literally.

**Gundam Wing © Sunrise. Harry Potter © J.K. Rowling. Used without permission and not for profit.**

_Italics_ - Thoughts, emphasis.

_**CAPS IN BOLD ITALICS**_ - Shouting/screaming.

_:Italics between colons:_ - Telepathic conversation.

_"Italics in quotation marks"_ - written messages; TV and radio transmissions, telephone conversations.

**Chapter Four: White Reflection**

**OZ's Lunar Base, June 12, AC 195**

Trowa and Hiiro went on high alert when they heard the sound of rifles being cocked. A few moments later, the trio of young Gundam pilots saw a squad of heavily armed OZ troops approaching them, guns aimed at the boys' heads.

Vastly outnumbered, the three young pilots put their hands on top of their heads and all of them surrendered without a fight. In spite of this, the soldiers tackled the three boys to the ground, though it took six of them to force Hiiro into a prone position and the butt of a pistol striking his head to finally subdue him.

Upon their capture, the OZ soldiers rounded the three boys up. Their wrists shackled in front of them, and then the soldiers marched them into the back of a transport truck headed for the Spaceport. From there, they would be loaded onto a shuttle headed back to the moon base, then subjected to interrogation, or rather tortured for information, imprisoned with Duo and Wu Fei, and likely executed within the next 24 hours.

"Move it, _scum!_" one of their captors, a middle-aged man whose face and body told of too many days of too much bad food and way too much cheap booze, bellowed, prodding the three boys into the truck with the muzzle of a machine gun. The soldier shoved Quatre hard, causing the blond-haired boy to stumble. Given his weakened state, it was not a surprise when he started to fall, but Hiiro and Trowa managed to catch him before he could hit the ground.

Trowa didn't need Quatre's Empathy or his own gift to know his best friend was afraid. He could see from the slightly younger boy's face and body that he was about to pass out from sheer, unrelenting terror. Quatre's downcast bright turquoise blue eyes were almost completely black; the pupils dilated so wide open that only a thin band of color showed, the pulse in his neck leapt with a rapid, clearly visible beat, and each breath he took was a hyperventilated gasp through his mouth.

"None of this is your fault, 04," the taller teen said softly, using Quatre's pilot designation to hide his identity, and a gentle tone of voice to try to calm him down. "That wasn't _you_ out there; that Gundam was controlling your mind. No matter what _they_ tell you, the only ones killed on that colony were OZ soldiers..."

"But 03... everything that happened out there _is_ my fault!" Quatre exclaimed guiltily, still gasping for air as he thought of his recent exploits. "If I'd been _stronger_, if I were a _real_ soldier instead of a spoiled brat playing one, I would have been able to save my father and Iria, and I would have controlled Wing Zero instead of _it_ controlling _me_. 03, if you and 01 hadn't stopped me when you did... I... _I would have killed all three of us!_ It _told_ me that I would!"

"You're wrong, 04," Hiiro added, cutting off Quatre's stream of self-recrimination. "You _are_ a soldier. You've undergone the same kind of training as the rest of us. There's something _wrong_ with the operating system on that Gundam. It diminished your mental capacity and made you its puppet. That's why what happened out there _isn't_ your fault. Shit happens, 04, and we're only human. You _almost_ made a mistake out there, but 03 and I stopped you before you did something unforgivable."

"_**SHUT UP!**_" the guard bellowed again, slapping Quatre hard on the back of his head. The boy nearly fell over, but recovered quickly, and if looks could kill, the glares the three young pilots gave the guard would have flayed the flesh from his bones as surely as if Trowa were still in possession of his knives.

When they arrived at the Moon Base, more soldiers escorted the young pilots off the shuttle, frisked them, uncuffed them, forced them to strip, then brutally and methodically searched them again, all at gunpoint. To the soldiers' consternation, there were no cries of pain from any of the three boys when the soldiers probed certain areas, though Quatre was visibly trembling.

After the strip search was finished, the guards herded the young pilots into a multi-stall shower room, and then thrust bars of harsh-smelling soap and coarse textured towels and washcloths into their hands. From there, the guards ordered the pilots to find a stall and wash themselves thoroughly. Hot water was a luxury on the Moon and no matter what age, prisoners of war didn't deserve such luxuries.

Once in the icy water of the shower, Quatre wedged himself into a corner of the stall and slid down until he sat on the floor with his thighs drawn to his chest. He wrapped his now thin arms around his legs, laid his forehead against his knees and tried his damnedest not to weep. The soldier who conducted the second search had hurt him and left him feeling both completely filthy and utterly violated. He doubted he would ever feel clean again, even if the water were boiling hot.

Honestly, what did they expect to find in there, that he was body-packing primacord and a detonator? Were they really _that bloody stupid?_

Unable to hold them in any longer, Quatre allowed himself the luxury of a much-needed soul purging crying jag. Scalding hot tears dripped down onto his bare thighs, only to be quickly cooled by the icy water of the shower as his chest heaved in racking, broken sobs. Quatre was overwhelmed by feelings of intense shame and guilt over attacking his friends. If he had done _anything_ to harm his friends, especially _Trowa_, his _best_ friend, he would never be able to forgive himself.

_: Quatre, are you all right? :_ The tall pilot thought to his friend, having heard Quatre's sobs. In response, the young Arabian boy shook his head in the negative. Trowa knew that Quatre's father not only died without one word of love or forgiveness for his only son, but the late head of the Winner clan actually tried, with his dying breath, to extort a promise from the boy to never pilot a mobile suit again.

: _I'm sorry about your father, Cat, but your sister's alive and well,_ : Trowa thought to his partner, and Quatre nodded.

Trowa's reaction to the strip search was nearly as bad as Quatre's, but Trowa now sported a swollen lower lip from sinking his teeth into it. It had brought some particularly painful memories to the surface of the seemingly stoic young pilot's mind. Memories of his time on Colony X-18999 and the man whose name he was given that the Earth-born pilot desperately wished he could forget.

The mercs who raised Trowa until he was nine had treated him well; that is, as well as a bunch of professional soldiers could treat a child. They never deliberately hurt or humiliated him, and treated him with a rough sort of affection, as though he were one of their own family. It wasn't until he emigrated to the L3 cluster and started working on Heavyarms that he learned _some_ adults didn't respect the boundaries between themselves and children. A bad encounter with the real Trowa Barton taught him that painful lesson.

Hiiro could empathize with his friends. During much of his training with Doctor J, the old mad scientist discussed the possibility of the boy encountering painful and humiliating things, but it never went any further than discussion. It wasn't until the Barton Foundation fully took over the Japanese pilot's training that he was actually _subjected_ to those and far _worse_ things.

_: Quatre, that strip search was just another way for these OZ pricks to humiliate us_, _:_ Hiiro "said" gently, having been brought into Trowa and Quatre's shared rapport. _: You're a lot stronger and tougher than you give yourself credit for. That Gundam's operating system was more than you could handle, and there's no shame in that. They're gonna shut the water off soon, so you should get yourself cleaned up. :_

With that, Quatre stood back up, rubbed the tears from his eyes, and gave himself a fast but thorough scrub down. He managed to finish rinsing the harsh soap off his body the moment the guards shut off the water, then the three Gundam pilots quickly dried themselves off.

Finally, the boys had standard issue OZ prison uniforms thrown at them. One of the soldiers ordered them to put the uniforms on, seeing as some of their comrades "accidentally" destroyed the clothes the three Gundam pilots were wearing at the time of their capture. Someone at the Romefeller Foundation had them made from a cheap, thin cotton fabric with the texture of fine sandpaper. They resembled one size fits all surgical scrubs and were dyed the ugliest shade of dark gray they could find.

Once dressed, the three boys once again found their wrists shackled in front of them. They then began their march through a confusing maze of corridors, headed towards the cell occupied by their fellow Gundam pilots.

Glad as he was to be even halfway clean, the young Arabian boy was shivering from the ice water shower, and the thin, coarse cotton fabric of the prison clothes given to them provided Quatre with no warmth at all. Of course, walking on a cold Neotitanium floor in his bare feet did not help matters, either.

Quatre lowered his eyelids as he considered what Hiiro and Trowa said to him on the shuttle. They were both right; he was a Gundam pilot, not an easily cowed child! Moreover, in spite of what these OZ idiots were saying, there was no _innocent_ blood on his hands! The civilians were safe on another colony! The only ones killed on that colony were OZ soldiers who shot at him first, and likely the same ones who murdered his father!

He was tired of feeling guilty and of being afraid. In fact, Quatre was pissed off and getting angrier by the moment. Hiiro and Trowa knew he was planning something when he "told" them to follow his lead, and to look surprised when he made his move. However, Trowa didn't have to fake his shocked reaction over what happened next.

"Traitor ...," the boy blond-haired boy said, turning towards Trowa with a look of pure rage on his face. "_**YOU'RE DEAD, YOU TRAITOR!"**_

Adrenaline and Quatre's combat training took over. While he lacked Hiiro's physical strength and Trowa's agility, he made up for it with grace and precision. Though exhausted and emaciated, he laced his fingers together, raised his arms as if to strike the normally stoic teen, then twisted at the waist and swung his bound limbs back, hitting the man behind him in the gut with one of his elbows.

A moment later, he swung around and executed a nearly perfect spin kick that connected with the second guard's face, and then struck the third guard with a punch to the underside of the man's nose. That drove the man's nasal septum into his brain, killing him instantly.

"You filthy little _whoreson_ … I'm gonna _kill_ you!" Quatre's second guard yelled as the third one dropped to the floor dead.

As this was happening, Hiiro took the opportunity to drop to the floor in a crouch to spin like a top on the ball of his left foot, sweeping the legs out from under two other OZzies with his right leg and knocking them flat on their well-padded asses. He then leapt at them and managed to punch one on the jaw. Not to be outdone, Trowa also dropped to the floor and mule kicked his guards both in their stomachs, then quickly stood up again and executed another kick, one that connected with the soldiers' faces.

While Quatre's first guard was still trying to catch his breath, the second guard struck the blond-haired boy hard across his face with a backhanded punch. The blow would have taken the fight out any other teen, but not a Gundam pilot. He took it limply, as his martial arts instructor taught him how to. It didn't keep him from seeing stars or nearly falling to the floor, but it prevented him from receiving a broken jaw. The soldier followed up with a punch to Quatre's gut, and then just started whaling on him.

Witnessing his friend's predicament, the lithe young acrobat shouldered another guard into the wall next to them and shouted, "_**GET YOUR HANDS OFF OF HIM!**_"

Before the other soldiers could stop him, Trowa rushed the one beating on Quatre. He grabbed the man by the collar and drove his left knee into the man's groin in retaliation for pain they were inflicting on his best friend. His reward was Quatre's immediate release and the feeling of one of the guard's testicles rupturing under his patella.

The first guard finally recovered from Quatre's elbow strike. He got up, grabbed the boy's wavy, pale blond hair near the base of his skull, and hauled him roughly up to his feet. He caught the blond-haired boy in a chokehold, and then jammed the muzzle of his pistol painfully under Quatre's chin.

"_**STAND DOWN, BOTH OF YOU!**_" the soldier shouted at Hiiro and Trowa. "Any more _funny business_ out of _either_ of you, and your pretty little boyfriend here gets a bullet in his brain!"

"Go to Hell, you fu ... _**nnnnnngh**_!" Quatre hissed at his captor in Arabic, which earned him another sucker-punch to the gut, this one from the guard he'd kicked.

"That's enough crap out of _you_, you little heathen bastard!" the guard who punched the blond-haired boy retorted, grinding his fist in.

Seeing the threat to the life of their friend and comrade, the still-seething Hiiro and Trowa had no choice but to stop fighting. OZ now knew the pilots' weakness; they cared what happened to the Arabian boy, and would do anything to protect him.

That was when reinforcements decided to show up, and they wasted no time "subduing" the Japanese and British Gundam pilots with the butts of their rifles to the backs of the boys' skulls. Hiiro and Trowa collapsed to their hands and knees, fighting the dizziness and nausea that accompanied the blows, and Trowa could feel the headache he'd gotten during the earlier battle getting worse.

Seeing his friends hurt, Quatre called out to them and struggled against his own captor to help them, but the soldier tightened the chokehold enough to start strangling the young empath. He didn't loosen his hold until Quatre nearly passed out from the lack of oxygen.

"What the _Hell_ are you fools doing?" The voice of one of the new soldiers rang out irritably. "Get off your lazy asses, all of you! You four," he pointed at some of the soldiers who came with him, "get 01 and 03 back on their feet and escort them to their cell! And you two idiots," he pointed at the ones holding Quatre, "take 04 to Interrogation Room 2, right now! General Tsuberov wants to question him personally! I'll take this poor bastard to the morgue!"

The soldiers split up, four "escorting" Hiiro and Trowa to the pilots' cell at gunpoint, and the other two dragging the still resisting Quatre down an adjacent corridor.

_I won't talk,_ Quatre thought as the guards led him away from his friends, fear forming a knot in the pit of young Arabian pilot's stomach_. No matter what they do to me, God knows I deserve it for what I've done, these bastards won't make me talk. Hiiro's right... I'm stronger than I give myself credit for and they won't break me._

_"Interrogation Room," my ass... this is a torture chamber_, Quatre thought sourly, still trying to break loose from his captors. _Well, if they think they're gonna get any information out of me, they're _sadly _mistaken._

The soldiers shoved him roughly into a dark, circular room where two other soldiers caught him. These two dragged him to the center of the chamber, where one of the soldiers grabbed a hanging chain with a large, heavy D-ring attached to it. The soldiers grabbed Quatre's bound arms, looped the cable between the shackles through the D-ring, and then one soldier pressed a red button on a control switch, which pulled him up towards the ceiling. The soldier pressed another button, and a bright spotlight came on over the boy's head, nearly blinding him. While he was blinded, the soldiers secured his legs with heavy manacles that were bolted to the floor.

Soon Quatre was hanging on display by his wrists, putting a nearly unbearable strain on his shoulders and chest because his feet no longer touched the floor. Moments later, Tsuberov appeared, carrying a slender wooden rod in one hand. Quatre couldn't even guess what it was for.

"Now you're going to answer some questions, boy," the Chief Scientist said as he slowly paced in front of the helpless Quatre, "and I won't harm you if you're being truthful. Tell me about that new Gundam and its operating system. How can it outmaneuver my Mobile Dolls?"

However, Quatre had other ideas. He replied angrily, staring straight ahead, "Name, Robert Walter Quinn, no rank, identification number LP4-GSR-GP04."

"Wrong answers, boy."

Tsuberov said something almost under his breath as he pointed the wooden rod at the blond-haired boy and Quatre screamed in agony, feeling as though millions of white-hot needles pierced every single nerve ending in his body all at once. The intense pain the young, blond Arabian pilot suffered caused him to briefly pass out several times.

The question-no answer-blinding pain dance continued for nearly twenty minutes, and training or no, Quatre was mildly surprised the pain hadn't driven him gibbering mad yet. Tsuberov asked his questions about Wing Zero one more time, but…

"Name, Robert Walter Quinn," Quatre snarled once again, still staring straight ahead, his breath coming out in a pant. Rage bubbled up to the surface and a savage grin pulled the corners of his mouth up. "No rank, ID number LP4-GSR-GP04. That's _all_ the information you bastards are gonna get out of me, so _do your worst!_"

"Oh, don't worry, boy, I _will_. I have no further use for Quatre Raberba Winner, except to turn you into a good little OZ _spy_, so... _Extergito animo hostem redigere Tabula rasa!_" Tsuberov said, once again aiming the tapered wooden rod at the blond-haired youth.

Before Quatre could react to hearing his real name, a jet of purplish-black light struck him, and he felt his eyes open to their widest extent as his battered face contorted into a silent scream of terror and his body began to convulse violently. Within moments, every trait and quirk that made up Quatre Raberba Winner's personality found itself shoved into a tiny, dark corner in the back of his mind.

Quatre tried the best he could to protect himself, but soon, even that fighting spirit was gone, and he found himself locked within the prison of his own body. Still wide-eyed, the tow-headed Gundam pilot's head dropped to his chest, all traces of sense, reason and personality seemingly gone.

Tsuberov grabbed the boy's hair to lift his head, examining his handiwork with a sadistically satisfied grin, and said, "Take him back to the cell where the other Gundam pilots are being held and bring Ensign Barton back with you. I'll take care of their little spy now, and deal with this brat later."

The soldiers unhooked the chain they'd hung Quatre from, then lowered Quatre's unresponsive body to the floor and freed his shackled arms from the D-ring and legs from their bindings. They grabbed the catatonic boy under his arms and lifted him up some, then half-dragged and half-carried him back to the cell that held his fellow Gundam pilots.

Back in their cell, the rest of the Gundam pilots wondered what went wrong. Trowa's hack into the Lunar Base's security system had successfully freed Duo and Wu Fei, but the soldiers recaptured them 150 feet from the mobile suit hangar where the Mad Five had the nearly completed Altron and Deathscythe Hell hidden.

"Dammit, we were _so close_ to getting outta here!" an enraged Duo Maxwell ranted. "Another fifty yards and Wu Fei and I woulda been in our Gundams, gotten outta here and blown this joint to Hell! But no; not only do these bastards _catch_ us again, they _stole my boots and my lock picks were in 'em!_ It's like they _knew_ we were gonna make a break for it!"

"Because they _did_ know," Hiiro growled angrily, looking up towards the ceiling. "They've had hidden cameras and microphones on us nonstop since my capture. I didn't notice them at first, but I do now. They've been watching every move we've made and heard every word we've said to each other. I wouldn't be surprised if they monitored mine and Trowa's transmissions while we were looking for Quatre."

"Unbelievable," Wu Fei grumbled irritably. He pinched the bridge of his nose between his thumb and forefinger, and then shook his head. "So they were eavesdropping on us the entire time we've been here, huh? So much for these OZ toadies being honorable, not that they know what the word "honor" means."

"If that's the case, guys, I think we should give our watchers our standard greeting for an enemy on three. One ... two ...," Trowa chimed in sourly. As he uttered the word "three," the four pilots all looked directly at one camera, raised their shackled arms, and gave whoever was monitoring them the one-fingered salute. In Duo's case, he gave them a double because Quatre wasn't there to flip them off himself.

A few seconds later, the door to the pilots' cell opened. The two soldiers who took Quatre to the Chief Engineer entered, dragging the limp form of Sandrock's pilot between them. One released his hold on the blond Arabian's arm, walked over to where his British counterpart sat, and prodded the cinnamon-haired boy with his booted foot.

"Get up, 03. _Commander_ Tsuberov wants to talk to you, now," the soldier said with an evil smirk as the other one dropped Quatre's unresponsive body to the floor. The guard then smugly added, "I _told_ you I'd show up when Colonel Une wasn't here to protect your skinny ass."

Trowa's only response to the guard's barbs was a death glare. At least that was what Duo called it when Hiiro used it. If this idiot thought a Gundam pilot was going to act like a frightened child, he had another think coming. As it was, Trowa was more concerned for the youngest Gundam pilot than he was for himself. Quatre hadn't looked good before the soldiers captured them, and he looked even worse now.

_Whatever Tsuberov did to you, Quatre,_ _he'll _pay_ for it, and I'll _cheerfully_ collect that debt for you_, the British Gundam pilot mused as he left the cell, his mood turning bloody.

As the door slid back into place, Duo knelt next to his tow-headed best friend. He saw Quatre's wide-staring eyes, then tried jostling him a little and talking to him, but got no response at all.

"Hey, Cat, you okay?" the American pilot asked, worried. "Hiiro, something's wrong with Quatre! I can't get him to respond!"

"Shit!" Hiiro exclaimed, his voice thick with concern. He strode over and knelt next to Duo, and then pressed two fingers against Quatre's neck. "His pulse is fast, but it's strong. Quatre, can you _hear_ me? C'mon, 04, snap out of it! _Katoru!_"

Hiiro caught Quatre by the shoulders and shook him gently... gently for him, at least. Being twice as strong as an adult man, Hiiro tried to be careful how he handled his comrade. There was no physical response from the blond-haired boy, but in a tiny, dark corner of his mind, Quatre beat on the walls of a cell, screaming to the others that he was there, and could hear them.

When Trowa arrived at "Interrogation," he came to the same conclusion Quatre had; it was a room specifically for torturing prisoners. As they hung him up like a side of beef, the British Gundam pilot decided to work the same routine his Arabian partner had before him. He would give OZ nothing but a name, even if he had to make one up, no rank because "rebel scum" had none, and the ID number Doktor S gave him when he left the L3 cluster to return to Earth.

_If Tsuberov thinks he's going to get a straight answer out of me, he's sadly mistaken,_ Trowa thought when the old man re-entered the room. When Tsuberov started questioning Trowa, all he got in response was "Name, Nanashi Oshimaida, no rank, ID number LP3-GHA-GP03."

"Eh? What the Hell kind of a name is "Nanashi Oshimaida"?" the Chief Engineer bellowed.

"That's just it," Trowa replied with an evil-sounding snicker. "It's _not a name_ at all. It's my swan song."

It was the truth. The captain of the mercenaries who had raised him from the age of two to the age of nine was Japanese, and he could not think of a good name to give the lost boy, so he stuck the youngster with Nanashi, or No-Name. He hadn't come by the name Trowa Barton until the real managed to get himself fatally shot in the back by an assistant of his Gundam's designer, Doktor S. The scientists had no plans to follow through with the mad schemes of the real Trowa's father, Dekim Barton, and he was going to get them all killed by ratting them out.

After what the nameless boy suffered at the hands of the real Trowa Barton, he would have loved to kill the man himself. It took nearly two weeks for him to recover from the incident.

The frustrated chief engineer of the Mobile Dolls reached into his robes and pulled out what appeared to be a highly polished stick of wood. Somehow, Trowa figured it was some kind of a weapon, possibly the very one used to harm Quatre. Tsuberov pointed the wooden rod at the boy, and said something in a language that sounded almost like Latin.

In spite of his training to withstand most forms of torture, the young British pilot's slim, lanky body convulsed in agony. For several long, excruciating seconds, all Trowa could feel was the nerve-searing, mind-numbing pain of a thousand white-hot needles stabbing him. He bit into his lower lip again, this time hard enough for it bleed, just to keep from screaming.

_What was that word ... crucify?_ Trowa asked himself silently, gasping as the pain began to fade. _No, not crucify ... _crucio_ ... torture. That's exactly what this is._

Unfortunately for Tsuberov, Trowa noticed that the guards hadn't bothered shackling his legs to the floor.

The pain almost gone, Trowa swung his long legs upward and kicked out with both feet, knocking the rod out of the scientist's hand. He sailed up further and, with a flip, managed to free his shackles from the D-ring. As he landed, the youth and the old man watched as the wand went sailing across the room to strike the Neotitanium floor, causing it to shatter into several pieces.

Tsuberov squawked as Trowa's feet struck his wrist and he backhanded the young Gundam pilot in retaliation, sending the boy crashing into the wall beside him and knocking him for a well-known loop as he bit back another yelp of pain. Tasting more of his own blood in his mouth, Trowa growled in anger while the OZ scientist stood over him, gloating over his petty triumph.

A moment later, the old man grabbed Trowa by the neck of his gray t-shirt until the boy's keen nose was close enough to pick up the bitter reek of liquor on Tsuberov's breath. The strong smell made Trowa nauseous, and he vowed that he would never drink _anything_ with alcohol in it, not even beer.

"You brats think you're all perfect little soldiers who feel no fear or pain, don't you?" Tsuberov said, cackling maniacally. The emerald-eyed boy responded by spitting a mouthful of blood and saliva in the chief engineer's ugly face, which got him a fist driven into his solar plexus, knocking the wind out of him, followed by another blow to his face.

"We'll see if you change your tune when you're all facing a firing squad," the chief engineer continued, though Trowa sensed he was lying about the firing squad. Romefeller wouldn't waste bullets the Gundam pilots. "Put this little bastard back with his friends so he can say goodbye to them. They're all scheduled to be executed first thing in the morning."

"What about 04, sir?" the soldier on Trowa's left asked. None of the men seemed to care that the young Heavyarms pilot was still conscious, or that he heard and understood everything that was going on around him.

"Without my wand to modify his memories, the Winner brat is useless to us. He'll be executed with his friends, but he won't know who he is, who they are or why he's dying with them."

_Dammit! _ Trowa thought, his eyes widening when he heard Tsuberov say Quatre's real last name. _These bastards_ know _who Quatre is, even though he's using an alias! Hiiro and I _never_ called him by his real name, just by his pilot's designation, so how is it even possible?_

Prodded on by blows and shoves, an enraged, confused and frustrated Trowa was "escorted" back to the cell he shared with the other Gundam pilots, there to await his inevitable death, but not before muttering the word "pompa." With that, phase one of "get revenge for Quatre" was complete. Next was to find a way to use this feeble gift of his to free himself and the others and get Quatre back to normal, then board the two nearly completed Gundams, Deathscythe and Altron, on to a transport and go back to Earth to retrieve Heavyarms, Wing and Sandrock.

In the torture room behind him, everything electrical began to flare into fountains of sizzling sparks and then burst into flames. The Russian aristocrat cursed as he ducked to avoid getting himself burned. It became apparent to the Chief Engineer that 03 not only knew how to use magic, but he didn't need a wand to do so.

Tsuberov knew of only two wizards who didn't need a wand to focus their magic. One was Albus Dumbledore, who had died from the Killing Curse nearly 15 years ago. The other was Harry James Potter, the boy who lived.

An hour later, in the room that served as both the atmosphere control and the surveillance station for the cells, an Ensign not much older than the five boys he watched on the monitors still chuckled over their earlier "greeting." Like Lady Une, he'd come to admire the young pilots for their tenacity and courage in continuing to fight, even when it was a losing battle.

As the door of the control room opened with a whoosh, the Ensign turned to see who was entering, then jumped up suddenly and snapped a smart salute to the men who came in. The soldier didn't like Mr. Tsuberov one bit; from his antiquated style of dress to the way he had enjoyed his torturing of 03 and 04, the man was just plain creepy. In the young man's opinion, the sooner the Colonel returned, the better.

"Good job, soldier," Tsuberov said as he entered the base's control room. Four heavily armed guards accompanied him.

"Sir!" the eager Ensign replied. Tsuberov walked over to the console the young man was monitoring and looked over the controls.

"Is _this_ the atmosphere control panel for the cells?"

"Yes, sir, it's controlled from here!"

"_Is that right_ ...?"

Tsuberov gripped a lever on the console and pulled it down until the windowed panel under it was all red. He had Duke Dermail's execution order to carry out, and contrary to what he said when torturing 03, he did _not_ intend to waste precious ammunition on a bunch of rebel brats, especially _not_ on the bastard son of the Boy Who Lived.

The Chief Engineer knew wandless magic when he felt it, and the boy was powerful enough to use it. He'd also been a Death Eater for far too long _not_ to recognize Harry Potter's emerald green eyes when they looked back at him.

"Mr. Tsuberov, wha ... what are you _doing_?" the shocked soldier asked as Tsuberov's guards grabbed him, forcing his arms behind his back.

"Just cutting off the air supply to the cells," Tsuberov replied with a sadistic grin. "No need to worry, soldier. You're just following orders!"

"Are these _Lady Une's_ orders?" the Ensign demanded.

"_I'm_ giving _these_ orders. Lady Une's gotten _far too soft_ for her own good, especially where those Gundam pilots are concerned!"

The soldier struggled for a moment, and then gave up, sagging to the floor in defeat. Lady Une was due back soon, and all the Ensign could do was wait for her return. Then Tsuberov would pay for his treachery.

Meanwhile, in their cell, four of the five young pilots noticed something was wrong.

"What the Hell?" the Chinese boy asked. "The air's getting thin!"

"Shite!" Trowa exclaimed as he pulled the unresponsive Quatre closer to him. "The bastard cut off the oxygen! We've maybe a half an hour of air left!"

"Looks like you were right, Trowa," Hiiro observed dryly. "Tsuberov decided _not_ to waste any bullets on us, after all."

"So they're gonna slowly _suffocate_ us instead! Damn, what a crappy way to kill us all off!" Duo growled, his rage flaring, then quickly fizzling out.

Since he deemed getting angry to be a waste of energy and oxygen, Wu Fei picked up the microprojector Duo had dropped when the soldiers threw Hiiro and Trowa into their cell. He sat down on the floor Indian style and began flashing the blueprints for his and Duo's Gundams on the wall. Hiiro joined him a moment later, and the two Asian youths began studying the blueprints carefully.

Duo noticed what his friends were doing, crawled over to them and asked "Hiiro, Wu Fei, what are you guys doing _that_ for? There's no sense in studying those _now!_"

"We all need to stay calm if we wanna live a little bit longer," Wu Fei replied, turning to look at his American friend. "We should know what our Gundams are gonna be capable of, if we manage to survive this."

"It's gonna take something _pretty drastic_ to get us out of this fix."

"That's why we're studying these," Hiiro interjected, "in case something drastic happens."

"Guys ...," Duo said to his comrades, then resigned himself to his fate and lay down on the floor. "Sorry, but I'm gonna throw in the towel. This is such a goddamn _lame_ way to die! This is _so_ uncool!"

Trowa could not help but overhear the other three pilots talking, and could hear the utter despair in their voices and in their minds. He hated to admit it, but his hope was almost gone, too, and he chuckled bitterly at that. He'd known since the age of eight that he would die in a war, but not like this.

"Y'know, Quatre, this situation would be almost funny if it weren't so bloody damned tragic," he murmured, giving the blond-haired boy what comfort he could. "Instead of dying on the battlefield like the soldiers we are ... or in front of a firing squad as prisoners of war ... Tsuberov is killing us off like a _coward_ would. Slowly and painfully."

The minutes slowly ticked away, bringing the five young men closer to a suffocating death, and oddly enough, the other pilots were all leaning against Trowa. Hiiro and Wu Fei both used a form of self-hypnosis to lower their heartbeat and respiration so the others could survive a few minutes longer. Duo passed out only a minute earlier. Quatre's breath came out in a faint, dry-sounding wheeze, then suddenly stopped.

The only one still awake was Trowa, his headache worsening as consciousness finally began to desert him.

_I _don't_ want to_ die _..._, Trowa thought, fighting for one more breath. _I don't want _any of us_ to die ... not yet, not like _this_, and not in _this_ place. I ... I want to know who I really _am_ first. I want ... to find ... my home_ _… and my ... my real family ..._

As Trowa slipped into unconsciousness, the five Gundam pilots vanished in a brilliant flash of blue-white light, accompanied by a thunderous **CRACK** that shook OZ's moon base to its foundations. The last thing Trowa thought he heard before passing out was the voice of a woman crying out someone else's name.

The name sounded like "Harry."

**Author's Notes:** Sorry this chapter took so long to finish. There's no excuse for it, other than I wanted it to be as close to perfect as possible. And I had a bad case of runaway muses dressed in OZ uniforms, holding Trowa and Quatre hostage. Moreover, I apologize for the length of this chapter. My muses decided to get even with me for corralling them.

For the reviewers who asked about Dumbledore's part in this: he died shortly before Triton/Trowa's birth, so he doesn't have any part to play.

My idea for Dekim Barton fully taking over Hiiro's training stems from an argument he had with Dr. J after the "Red Wolf" incident, as shown in _EW_ and touched on in _Episode Zero_. In the voice over, as Hiiro's carrying the dead puppy, Dekim is screaming at J about Hiiro having feelings of guilt ("A perfect soldier doesn't _need_ emotions!"), and J responds with "Is this what Hiiro Yui would have wanted?" (Referring to Operation Meteor, and of course not, but Dekim was a delusional baka.) I figured J did everything he could to try to protect Hiiro, while Dekim threw the boy under the metaphorical bus.

The "name/rank/serial number" routine Quatre and Trowa give Tsuberov goes as follows: Name/alias; "no rank" because there was no military rank for the Gundam pilots during the Earth-Space War (which had raged for 20 years before the Gundams came to Earth) or the Barton Uprising. Finally, the "ID number" stands for the Colony that sent them, the name given to their Mobile Suit, and the pilot's alphanumeric designation.

Trowa has no real name at this time; hence, "Nanashi", no rank, ID number LP3-GHA-GP03. The "Oshimaida" bit is Japanese for "it's finished." It's both Trowa's admission that his cover was blown & a tip of the hat to the CBS series _NCIS,_ my favorite live action show. Quatre used the alias of Robert Walter Quinn, which I created for another story, no rank, ID number LP3-GSR-GP04. So _voila_, there it is.

Yeah, I know having someone say "do your worst" is kind of cliché, but if anyone can carry it off, an angry Quatre who's still fighting off the influence of the ZERO System can. As for Quatre's fighting skill, I might be playing them up a little, but I'm not making them up at all. In episode 4, Rashid thoughts on Trowa were "I'm just relieved that _this guy who can fight as well as Quatre_ isn't an enemy." (Emphasis mine) I took it to mean that Quat has some mad fighting skills both in _and_ out of Sandrock. :)

The reference to Hiiro's greater than normal strength comes from the beginning of the manga sequel _Ground Zero_, where the boys find and delete some computer files Treize and OZ had on them. That and the further upgrades to the Gundams seem to be the only parts of that manga that are considered canon. The reason is because, with the sole exception of Wu Fei, everyone was written completely out of character.

The curse I created for Quatre's mindwipe, _Extergito animo hostem redigere Tabula rasa_, is Latin for "Wipe clean the mind of my foe, reduce it to a blank tablet." If it were real, the mind of its victim would be regressed back to its infancy, making them a tabula rasa, a blank slate open to manipulation. I felt that because of what it does and the amount of pain it causes Quatre, it would be damn close to an Unforgivable Curse.

Oh, the word "pompa" means "fireworks." Thank you, Google Translate.

Besides, I'm gonna use Obliviate in another chapter.

**Next chapter:** With two of their number down, the Gundam pilots suddenly appear at 12 Grimmauld Place, Harry and Ginny meet their teenaged son, now a wanted terrorist and Gundam pilot, and Sally Po meets Madame Pomfrey.


	5. Signs of Life

**Disclaimers, Ratings, Archive, Etc.:** See Chapter One.

**Chapter Summary:** With two of their number down, the Gundam pilots suddenly appear at 12 Grimmauld Place, Harry and Ginny meet their teenaged terrorist son, and Sally Po meets Madame Pomfrey.

**Note for Weasley bashers: **This chapter contains **no** Weasley bashing, lots of Ginny and Harry, and scenes of near-death experience.

**Chapter Five: Signs of Life**

**Number 12 Grimmauld Place, London, June 12th, AC 195**

As she did most every morning, Ginny Potter woke up in a good mood. She rolled onto her back and stretched, feeling every one of her vertebrae pop back into place, then kicked off the blankets and hopped out of bed. She went about her morning routine of a shower, using a charm to remove any stubble from her legs, and brushing her teeth, then quickly dried off, got dressed, and went downstairs.

Her husband, Harry, was already out of bed; he'd been up for a couple of hours now, probably reading the Daily Prophet or the Guardian, and was now fixing breakfast in the kitchen. Their three children, James Sirius, Albus Severus and Lily Luna, were downstairs with their father, letting their mother sleep in for a change. Her brother Ron, his wife Hermione, their children Rose and Hugo, and Harry's godson Teddy would be stopping by as they did every Sunday. The plan was for them to have a nice family day together, including a good dinner of Irish stew with herbed dumplings.

The morning meal was a noisy, cheerful affair, with the children relaying what their father had read to them from both the Daily Prophet and the Guardian to their mother. The Guardian had published an article about the capture of the two remaining Gundam pilots, as well as the pending execution of the five, all of whom were around 14 or 15, the same age Triton would be.

It saddened Harry and Ginny that anyone would force children to fight a war started by adults years before any of them were born, but they'd had experience with that, too.

Ginny's older brother, Ron Weasley, his wife Hermione and their kids arrived shortly after the Potters finished breakfast, and the five children ran out to the backyard to play. Harry had Auror business to discuss with the Weasleys, so the three left for his study. Ginny started to clear the table, and as she did, a sound like a crash of thunder after a lightning strike shook Grimmauld Place to its foundations, and she raced into the living room to investigate.

Lying on the living room floor were five teenaged boys. They all looked to be about 14 or 15 years old, two of them seemingly unconscious and the other three were gasping for air. All of them had their wrists shackled in front of them, and three of them looked as though they'd recently endured a bad beating.

The first boy was Asian, most likely of Chinese descent. His straight hair was the same shade of black as Harry's, which he kept slicked back into a neat ponytail at the base of his skull. He wore a dark blue "wife beater" and a pair of loose-fitting pants made of heavy white cotton that were banded at the ankles.

The second boy was very distinctive looking; he was a Caucasian youth who had a meter-long braid of chestnut brown hair and wore black jodhpurs, a black notch-collared shirt with a thin white turtleneck sweater under it. The boy's clothes almost reminded her of a Catholic priest's garb.

The third one, also Asian, had tousled dark chocolate-brown hair and bruises covering nearly every inch of exposed, lightly tanned skin. He wore a pair of tan-gray surgical scrubs with a number stamped on the left side of the chest. To Ginny, they looked like the same uniform inmates locked up in Azkaban Prison now wore, only with the letters "OZ" inscribed above the inmate number.

The fourth youth was also Caucasian; a painfully thin and badly bruised boy with shaggy waves of hair the pale gold color of sunlight. His features were nearly as pretty as a girl's, and what skin that could be seen under all the black and blue looked as fine and fair as Irish porcelain. He, too, was dressed like an OZ prisoner.

The fifth youth was another Caucasian, and also wore the garb of a captive of OZ. He was a couple of inches taller than the other four, and had straight, cinnamon-colored hair with long bangs that covered nearly half of his own bruised and battered face. The bangs reminded her of an overgrown, full-frontal cowlick, and there were several splits and bloody teeth marks decorating his lower lip.

Except for the length and darker color of his hair, the lack of freckles and, of course, the bruises, he looked almost exactly as she did at fourteen years old, but was as tall and lanky as her brother Bill had been at that age. He was the one Ginny stared at the most intently, as if she knew him from somewhere.

Ginny screamed "_**HARRY!**_" at the sight before her.

"Ginny? What's wrong?" Harry asked as he came out of the study, followed closely by Ron and Hermione. It was almost enough for Harry to flash back to some of the beatings he'd received from his late, unlamented uncle. "Oh, Merlin..."

"Bloody Hell," Ron croaked as he felt his eyes bugging out. "Where'd _they_ come from?"

"I don't know! They just Apparated in!" Ginny exclaimed as she knelt down next to one of the boys. "Harry, this boy here... he looks like Triton!"

"Ginny," Hermione said, placing her hand on her sister-in-law's shoulder, "it's been almost fifteen years! Are you...?"

"You know as well as I do that only _family_ or _those we invite_ can get past the house wards, and I think I'd know my own son when I see him! For Heaven's sake, Hermione, you used your cell phone to take a video of Triton peeing on Harry when he was only three hours old!"

Harry turned crimson from the neck up as Ron sputtered and Hermione tittered, trying not to laugh at that memory. Madame Pomfrey was showing Harry the proper way to change a baby boy's nappie one moment, and the next he was all wet and smelling of pee. Worse, Harry could have _sworn_ his three-hour-old son was _giggling_ at his soggy, urine-soaked father.

Harry pulled his wand out of its wrist sheath and made to cast a simple charm when Ron stepped in.

"Harry," he said, "even if this boy _is_ Triton, for all we know the _rest_ of them might be Muggles. We _can't_ take the chance...!"

"Ron, what we can't do is worry about the bloody Secrecy statute now. They're hurt, and those shackles need to come off, so... _Removere sua constrictionem_," Harry said with a flick of his wand. A split-second later, the shackles unlocked themselves and fell off the wrists of all five boys with a soft clank of metal landing on the wood floor. Moments later, the confused and very blue-eyed Japanese boy woke up, sat up and looked around.

"Huh? Where are we? We're no longer on the Lunar Base," he said. "02, 03, 04 and 05, what's your status?"

"My status is that I feel like crap and I think I'm gonna puke," the plait-haired boy, an American from his accent, grumbled sourly as he started to sit up. "Aw, _man_... what the Hell did 03 _do?_ Now I know how a chocolate shake feels when it's sucked through a straw."

"I don't know what he did, either, but I'm _glad_ we're out of that death chamber," the Chinese boy said, also in a grumble. "My status is also breathing and queasy. How about you, 01?"

"Same here. Zero Three and Zero Four, what's your status? Trowa!?" the Japanese boy said to the cinnamon-haired youth. He held the taller boy's shoulders and shook him gently, but he didn't get a response. A finger placed first at the base of his throat then under his nose confirmed the worst.

"Dammit, he's not breathing and there's no pulse! Duo, check on Quatre! Wu Fei, start chest compressions! I'll start giving Trowa mouth-to-mouth!" "01" exclaimed, and when "Wu Fei" looked at him oddly, he added "You _have_ to do it! I'll _break his ribs_ if I try!"

"Right, Hiiro," "Duo" replied as he checked "Quatre" for a pulse while "Wu Fei" and "Hiiro" worked on "Trowa," trying to revive him. A moment later, he added "Damn! Nothing! C'mon, Cat, don't _do_ this to us! 'Snot your time! Shinigami doesn't want your skinny ass yet!"

Duo started giving Quatre CPR and mouth-to-mouth just as Hiiro and Wu Fei started trying to revive Trowa. By some odd coincidence, the two started breathing again at the same time, but while Trowa's eyes flew open as he gasped and sat up, Quatre was just as unresponsive as he'd been in their cell on the Moon Base.

Trowa was dizzy, his head still foggy from the blows he'd received on the colony and moon base, the bone-deep exhaustion caused by the lack of oxygen and whatever he did to get them off the Moon. All he wanted was to curl up on something soft and sleep for a week, but he couldn't, not until he knew Quatre was all right.

Harry looked over the sunlight-haired youth and knew what was wrong with him. He'd heard of several "former" Death Eaters, one named Tsuberov in particular, joining OZ to escape from the Aurors. They had created a particularly nasty curse they called the Tabula Rasa, or Blank Slate curse, which they used to literally reduce the mind of their victim back to its infancy. Then the caster could "rewrite" the victim's memories, making them blindly loyal to OZ and the Romefeller Foundation.

"Anyone who would use _that curse_ on a _child_ should get hit with the damned thing themselves. Maybe then they could be reprogrammed into decent human beings. Fortunately, I know the countercurse for this. Here goes..." Harry gently cupped the blond-haired boy's chin, tilted his face up and said "_Hanc puer animum leniter a abyssi._"

Quatre's reaction to the countercurse was immediate; he gasped as every one of his memories came flooding back, and then promptly passed out with a soft groan of sheer exhaustion. The strain of everything he'd been through the past few weeks had finally caught up with him. Hiiro, Duo and Wu Fei were all speechless over the change, but Trowa wasn't.

"_**Quatre?! **__**QUATRE!**_" the cinnamon-haired youth exclaimed, a sudden surge of adrenaline clearing his head for the moment and giving him enough strength to crawl over to his partner and push Harry aside.

"It's all right, son; he's just passed out," Harry replied calmly as he collected himself. "He'll wake up again in a little while, and so will you... _somnum fili mi._"

With those words and a flick of Harry's wand, Trowa stopped fighting the exhaustion he'd been trying to ignore since being revived and fell into a deep sleep. Harry then picked the taller boy up while Ron scooped up the unconscious Quatre to carry upstairs, but the two wizards found themselves being blocked by three very irate boys.

"Where are you taking them?" Hiiro demanded, wishing he has a pistol on him.

Ron chuckled at the young man's ferocity, and Harry replied with "Upstairs to one of the spare bedrooms. All of you need to rest and recover from... what's happened to you."

"Who are you, where are we, and what the Hell's going on here?" an alarmed Duo asked.

"Could ask you the same things," Ron countered.

"My friend asked _you_ first," Wu Fei retorted with a huff.

It took the four wizards a moment, but they realized the boy looked vaguely familiar. Cho Chang once mentioned a cousin who lived on a colony in the L5 cluster with their family... could this boy be her cousin's son?

"The name is Harry Potter, this is my wife Ginny, my brother-in-law, Ron Weasley, his wife Hermione, and you're in my home," Harry answered. "How you got here is anyone's guess, but if you are who I _think_ you are, you're more than welcome to stay a while, at least until OZ stops looking for you. We've got plenty of room."

As the three conscious Gundam pilots followed their comrades and hosts up to the third floor, Hiiro, Duo and Wu Fei noticed a group of five children peeking around the corner, gawking at them. If Duo had to hazard a guess, he figured the eldest boy to be eight, the middle boy and eldest girl to be seven, and the youngest two, one girl and one boy, to be around five. They were mostly red-headed, with one brunette and one with black hair, and all of them were adorable.

When the three teens were out of earshot, Hermione summoned the house elf, Kreacher, and asked him to bring Madam Pomfrey and someone from Gringotts to perform a test. The ancient house elf complied, vanishing into thin air.

"Mummy, who's that tall boy?" a frightened Lily asked Ginny. Her brothers, James and Albus, and her cousins Rose and Hugo, were standing behind her, just as curious and as scared as she. None of the Potter children knew they had an older brother yet, and Ginny didn't know what to tell them.

Ginny knelt down to her daughter's level, tucked her into her arms and replied with "Daddy and I are going to find out, sweetheart."

**-== 0000 ==-**

When Trowa woke up again, he found himself lying on a strange bed in a strange room with an unconscious Quatre lying beside him. As he managed to get into a half sitting, half lying position, he could see that both of them were being fussed over by a kind-looking woman with graying blonde hair, and standing next to her was an attractive young woman with light brown braids and silvery blue eyes.

He didn't recognize either woman by sight, but recognized the dulcet contralto voice of the younger one. It belonged to Doctor Sally Po, a major with the former United Earth Sphere Alliance, current anti-OZ freedom fighter and the woman Wu Fei couldn't stop talking about. Seeing that Sally wanted to talk, the older woman left the room to give them some privacy.

"Hi there, cutie pie," Sally said with a dose of good humor as she finger combed Trowa's hair from his eyes. In her opinion, he had a nice face and it was a shame to cover half of it up.

"Nice to finally be able to put a face to the voice," he replied softly, a slight smile on his face though he was still rather tired. "Does Wu Fei know you call every guy you meet cutie pie?"

Sally chuckled at Trowa's joke; he wasn't nearly as stoic or as humorless as people thought he was. At that point, the older woman came back in and started examining Quatre, who was still out like a light.

"Hello, my name is Madam Pomfrey. How are you feeling?" She finally asked Trowa.

"I'm fine, but I'm very, very tired. What about...?"

"Your friends? They're a bit stressed out from everything that's happened, but they're fine. They're just down the hall."

"And Quatre?" Trowa asked, concerned.

"Sleeping the sleep of a child who's magically exhausted himself, just as you should be doing," the matron replied. She took a good look at Trowa and added "You look just like your mother, but you have your father's eyes."

_"Magically exhausted"? And what the Hell did she mean by _that_ remark?_ An angry and confused Trowa thought as he looked at Quatre's supine form.

The tow-headed boy looked so peaceful in his repose, and the cinnamon-haired youth couldn't resist finger-combing the soft hair from Quatre's sweet face. It was becoming difficult for Trowa to believe that just a few hours ago, he and Hiiro were fighting for their lives _against_ Quatre; a Quatre possessed by a demonic mobile suit operating system.

At the other end of the hall, Wu Fei slipped out of his borrowed room and into the room Harry assigned to Hiiro and Duo. Once inside, the Chinese boy checked the hall to make sure no one was around to eavesdrop. After closing the door, Wu Fei grabbed the chair by the desk, then turned it towards the twin beds and sat down in it. Then and only then did the three Gundam pilots start talking about the Potters and the Weasleys.

"What do you think? Can we trust them?" Hiiro asked his two comrades.

"I don't know... they _seem_ all right, but...," Wu Fei replied.

"But what?"

"They're hiding something from us," Duo chimed in. "They're not lying to us, at least not that _I_ can tell, but they are _definitely_ hiding something they think is important _from_ us. Something about Trowa. Damn, I wish Cat were awake! _He's_ the human lie detector, not me!"

The three boys looked down at the hardwood floor and wondered if their friends were all right.

Meanwhile, back in the room occupied by Trowa and Quatre, the woman with the bushy brown hair came in with a creature that looked like every description his old Captain had ever given him of a goblin, only he was dressed in a three-piece business suit. The creature withdrew a small, curved and wickedly sharp bladed knife from a pocket of his waistcoat and the jabbed the tip of Trowa's middle finger, drawing blood.

"_**OW! WHAT THE HELL?!**_" Trowa bellowed while the goblin, Hrothgar, watched the blood from Trowa's finger drip onto an ancient piece of parchment.

After a moment, the names and lines of a family tree began to form on the sheet, starting with someone named Triton Remus Potter and going back several generations, but it was the identities of this Triton's parents that threw him for a loop.

"Well, Hrothgar, what's the verdict?" an anxious Harry asked.

"It's him, Lord Potter," Hrothgar said with a curt nod in Trowa's direction. "This young man is your son Triton."

**-== 0000 ==-**

**Author's Notes:** I just want to start out this chapter's AN by saying that I apologize for how long it's taken to get this chapter finished. My dad isn't getting worse but he's not really getting any better, and I'm still having a hard time trying to replace my laptop.

When I decided to write Teddy into this (he appears in the next chapter), I had to look up not only his birthday to find out whether or not he would be older or younger than Trowa, but Jamie, Al, Lily, Rose and Hugo's birthdays, as well. Teddy's a few months older than Trowa (Teddy and Relena's b-days are in April), Rosie is Al's age, and Hugo and Lily are the same age.

Speaking of birthdays, I'm going by one of the Gundam Wing production books had on the pilots birthdays. Duo's is on February 2nd (known to Catholics as Candlemas and to the US as Groundhog Day), so he's already 15. Trowa's is on July 22nd and Hiiro's is on August 7th (17 days apart), so they're almost 15. Wu Fei and Quatre share a birthday; December 12th, and Wu Fei is the elder of the two. They're still 14. I know Gundam Wikia says the dates are fanon, but when the official sites say they're canon, they are.

The term "full frontal cowlick" is mine, but feel free to use it if you want. Something that funny should be released to the Universe.

The spell Harry uses to free the boys, _Removere sua constrictionem_, the one to break the Tabula Rasa curse, _Hanc puer animum retro leniter a abyssi_, and the one that put Trowa to sleep, _somnum fili mi_, literally translate from the Latin to "Remove their restraints," "Bring this boy's mind back gently from the abyss," and "sleep, my son." I always thought _Alohomora_ was more a lock-picking spell for doors, not restraints.

Funny thing, every time I read or write something with Cathy and/or Sally in it, my mind won't use Cathy Weseluck's voice as Cathy Bloom's nor Moneca Stori's for Sally; my brain uses Moneca's voice for _Cathy_ and Samantha Ferris' voice for Sally. Sally's in this chapter, and if you've been wondering where Cathy is, she'll appear in Chapter 8.

While I'm here, I thought I'd let everyone know that I've translated Chapters 1 through 3 (so far) into Japanese and posted them on a site called Pixiv, which is kind-of like a Japanese deviantArt. I can't read Kanji (YET), but people in the Land of the Rising Sun seem to like it, too.

**Next chapter:** While on a reconnaissance mission, Hiiro meets up with someone who thinks OZ has carried out the execution order on the Gundam pilots, Trowa meets more members of his family, and Wu Fei has a reunion of his own.


End file.
